Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Robertson, appointed civil secretary in 1945, did not share these views. He disliked what he felt to be the obscurantism and eccentricity of the southern district commissioners, and believed that the southern Sudan had to be ‘opened up and brought into touch with reality’.10 The nature of this ‘reality’ was probably as unclear to Sir James as to everyone else. He certainly misjudged, as did so many others, the pace of change in the colonial empire and the speed with which parts of it were hurrying along the path to independence. While Robertson was directing the political affairs of the Sudan, the governor general became a figurehead who, in many cases, had not served much time in the Sudan. The men appointed under this arrangement were very different from the soldier administrators like Kitchener and Wingate who had served in the region for decades and were fluent in Arabic. Yet even the more desk-bound administrators like Robertson were allowed to direct policy themselves, in much the same way that MacMichael had done in the 1930s; as always in the British Empire, it was the individual that mattered. A strong, masterful governor general like Sir Reginald Wingate could direct his own government, but when the governor general was less forceful, or more ignorant of Arabic and the Sudan in general, as Sir John Maffey had been in the 1920s and 1930s, the civil secretary took charge and imposed his vision on the country. Robertson, a powerfully built man with a strong independent will, did not foresee in the 1940s the ‘sudden change in the world situation which led to the rapid colonial emancipation of the 1950s and 1960s’.11 He did, however, succeed in reversing MacMichael’s ‘Southern Policy’, just before independence was granted to the Sudan, which upset the precarious balance that prevailed there.

  In the words of a modern expert on the Sudan, Robertson ‘rushed in where Mandarins feared to tread’.12 He announced the effective end of the ‘Southern Policy’ in 1946. As the Sudan groped its way to self-government, it was decided that the only basis for progress was for the two parts of the country to be welded together to form one country, which might then, over time, move towards full independence. The forum where all this was decided and put in place was a conference held in the capital of the southern Sudan, Juba, in June 1947. The conference lasted only two days, but the fundamental decision to combine the south with the north was taken. There had been an initial difficulty because the southern delegates had stated clearly that they did not feel their region was ready for self-government, while the northern delegates were insistent that they needed self-government immediately. Robertson himself realized the danger in which the southerners were placed, since the south was less well developed and had fewer educational facilities, with little infrastructure of any kind. Without ‘safeguards’ to their culture, he believed that the south would be ‘overwhelmed and swamped’ by the north. The ideal safeguard would, of course, be the ‘maintenance of a British controlled administration with British governors and District Commissioners’.13 This judgement was naive given that, in 1947 when the independence of India was imminent, it was becoming clearer that the British might have to leave the Sudan at some time in the not too distant future, and what would become of the south then?

  Privately, Robertson was not too optimistic about the ability of the south to compete in the united Sudan, as there were still ‘limited facilities for education above the elementary level’ in the region. From what he had seen, he had concluded that the educated southern Sudanese made ‘good clerks’, but that a large proportion failed ‘when given positions of financial responsibility’. Many of the educated southerners, in his view, showed an ‘instability of character and proneness to alcoholic excess which is a little disturbing’. This, he believed, was due to the fact that education lifted them out of their ‘tribal environment’ and thus disorientated them. Robertson recognized that very little advance had been made in the ‘evolution of social equality’ between north and south, and he did not hesitate to blame the south for this disparity and lack of progress. In the same report, dating from 1950, Robertson railed against ‘Nilotic Conservatism’ which regarded cattle as a ‘social institution and a means to the acquisition of wives’, instead of as an economic asset. He was quite open about his anti-southern bias. The lack of ‘social equality’ was partly the fault of the average southern Sudanese man, who was ‘not readily responsive or companionable outside his own immediate circle’.14

  Although the Sudan was still nominally under the dual sovereignty of Britain and Egypt, the British were firmly in the dominant position. It was under British auspices that a Legislative Assembly was convened in December 1948, though this hardly represented the people of Sudan. As one British official remarked in 1950, the Legislative Assembly is ‘not a fully representative body’ and ‘a large and important section of the Muslim population has no share in the government of the country’.15 The Legislative Assembly appealed to the old official prejudices in favour of ‘natural leaders’, the sheikhs, chiefs and petty princes. It was this predilection for natural leaders which, perhaps more than any other political impulse, defined the British Empire. The publicity agent for the Sudan government, E. N. Corbyn, based in London, could not conceal his delight at the new Sudanese Legislative Assembly as he observed its first session in the spring of 1949:Looking down the list of names anyone who has long known the Sudan will find the sons of the tribal leaders, with whose fathers he used to ride on camel-back over their wide tribal areas years ago. These men who have come to Khartoum to the Legislative Assembly are the natural leaders of the real Sudan . . . Thus the Sudan’s first Legislative Assembly is a wholesome one.16

  Furthermore, these natural leaders were ‘men of strong personality and independent minds’, exactly the kind of men who, if they had been British, would have been recruited to the Sudan Political Service.

  The natural leaders were also generally men of property who wielded influence as tribal leaders. They were decidedly not part of the urban intelligentsia or effendia class, whom most British officials despised. ‘Effendi’ is a Turkish term, widely heard in Egypt and the Sudan in colonial times, which now, in modern Turkish, is used where an English-speaker might say ‘Mr’. In the colonial period, the effendi were the educated classes, the intellectuals, who often adopted a strongly nationalist stance against British colonial rule. Years later, when reflecting on mistakes made by the British in the Sudan, Sir James Robertson accepted that this class of person had been foolishly overlooked. The Sudan government had ‘tended to put too much emphasis on the Nazirs and the Sheiks and not enough on the small educated class’. The British ‘were much more friendly with the country members than with the “effendia”’. Sir James went on to suggest candidly, ‘I suppose we thought that the “effendia” were aiming to take our place.’ Other ‘grave errors’ included the failure to do ‘anything until 1944 to create some central body in which the Sudanese could voice their opinions’, and, lastly, the failure to ‘develop the South’ after the ‘Southern Policy’ of MacMichael had been adopted in 1930.17

  Meanwhile, the Sudan accelerated towards independence, prompting Robertson, who by 1956 was safely ensconced as Governor General of Nigeria, to regret ‘the haste and untidiness of it all’.18 The rapidity of the move to full independence, which occurred only eleven years after the end of the Second World War, surprised British officials in the Sudan more than it did the civil servants in Whitehall. The process was certainly ‘untidy’. The date for independence had been set for 1 January 1956, but disturbances and serious unrest had taken place even before the British had left. The ‘Southern Policy’, described as a ‘comprehensive plan to build up a series of self-contained racial and tribal units . . . based upon indigenous customs, traditional usage and beliefs’, had been hated by the Arabic-speakers of the north, who saw it as a symbol of the British tendency to divide and rule. In the south, the Juba conference was resented, because it sealed the emergence of a single, unitary state. The south, as independence drew near, wanted a federal system, which the northerners rejected, while the British were increasingly anxious to ge
t out of the Sudan, even before the Sudanese had agreed on a permanent constitution.

  The situation was heading towards a crisis. The 1950s saw a rising tide of Arab nationalism across the Middle East, as people struggled to free themselves from what they saw as Western imperialism, or from feudal constitutions which, as in the case of Iraq and Egypt, placed countries under monarchical rule. The abolition of the Egyptian monarchy by the Free Officers’ coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser in July 1952 was followed by the new Egyptian government’s abandonment of any lingering claims of sovereignty over Sudan.19 Arab nationalism had its effect in making northern Sudanese politicians more focused on achieving independence and less willing to accommodate the south, which, in terms of population, comprised only a quarter of the country. As the British Foreign Office drily observed, the ‘nationalistic self-confidence which is now the mood of all independent Middle Eastern states is not conducive to successful colonial rule’.20

  The explosive situation reached its climax in August 1955 when troops of the Sudan Defence Force based in the south mutinied. The structure of the Force had made such an event likely, as it was split into battalions which had been selected along ethnic lines. There were ‘black battalions’ from the south and then there were the Camel Corps and the Eastern Arab Corps, which, as their names implied, were units composed exclusively of Arabic-speakers.21 The south protested, in a violent way, against the increasing dominance that northern Arabic-speakers began to wield in their territory. As the British began to leave the Sudan in the early 1950s, the vacuum which had been left in the south of the country was filled by officials from the north. This arrangement led to even more confusion. The Sudanese civil service was now dominated by northerners to such an extent that, in 1954, only six out of 800 senior officials were from the south. The presence of northern administrators, teachers and traders in the south was resented, and rekindled old fears which stemmed from the days when northern raiders would literally hunt down the peoples of the south to take them into slavery.22

  On 18 August 1955 a company of soldiers from the Equatoria Corps staged a mutiny at Torit. This southern unit had been summoned to Khartoum, where the men believed they would have been rounded up and executed, before being replaced by soldiers from the north. Instead, the soldiers began turning on Arabic-speaking northern officers, administrators and merchants and their families. The situation was aggravated when the majority of the 400 or so police officers in the region joined the mutineers. Ismail al-Azhari, the Sudanese Prime Minister, still under the jurisdiction of the Governor General, ordered northern soldiers to be transported to the south to restore order. The troops were taken in British aircraft, which caused resentment towards the British on the part of the southern Sudanese. The northerners, in turn, were furious that the British authorities in Uganda refused to extradite people whom they believed had instigated the coup. The mutiny itself was viewed in sections of the northern Sudan press as part of an imperialist plot. Omdurman Radio was explicit about this: ‘The rash sedition in the South was deep-rooted, as a result of 50 years during which Imperialism filled the hearts of Southerners with spite and hatred against the Northerners.’ The radio broadcast even suggested that the ‘Southern Army mutinied under a premeditated plan which we believe was perpetrated by a foreign hand’.23

  The British, according to the broadcast, were duplicitous, offering to help the Sudan on the one hand while shielding the mutineers on the other. The newspaper Ayam, a northern Sudanese publication, stated that it was the Governor General’s job ‘to see to it that the mutineer refugees in Uganda are brought back to the Sudan at the first opportunity for their trial’, and that, if the Ugandan government refused to hand them over, the ‘whole affair’ would reveal ‘Britain’s conspiracy against the Sudan’.24 Those mutineers who had escaped to Uganda were the lucky ones, as many others surrendered believing the Governor General Sir Knox Helm’s promises of ‘fair trial, clemency and safe conduct’. He left the Sudan for good on 13 December 1955, and the mutineers were simply tried by courts martial; the courts martial handed down about 180 death sentences, most of which were subsequently carried out.25 Yet for northerners to complain about Britain’s actions was unfair. Throughout the crisis, the Foreign Office in London had been determined that the north’s desire to keep the country united should be realized. An ‘independent, unified and stable administration’ was needed in the Sudan as a buffer and a barrier against Egyptian expansion. For this reason, ‘Her Majesty’s Government must do all that is in its power to retain the confidence of the present Sudan Government and of the Northern Sudanese.’ This would entail ‘some temporary sacrifice of effective administration in the Southern Sudan and possibly of the interests of the Southerners’. In short, the Foreign Office view was that anarchy in the south was preferable to the disintegration of the new state that the British were leaving behind.26

  In the last months of 1955, British control of the Sudan had more or less collapsed. The northern Sudanese were moving into positions of power in Khartoum and elsewhere in the northern regions, while in the south the ‘two and a half million inhabitants’ were, so far as the British authorities in London were concerned, now ‘virtually unadministered’.27 It is clear from the sources that the British themselves felt some responsibility for the events in the Sudan. In a report to the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, written in October 1956, Chapman Andrews observed that the ‘policy pursued over a long period by the British Administration and [the] influence of Missionaries were also important causes of the trouble . . . For whatever reason, and however justifiable, both combined to separate the South from the North and therefore to make the rule of the Northerners unacceptable.’ The problem, in all this confusion, as British officialdom saw it, was the old bugbear of Arab nationalism and the ‘unstable emotionalism which affects all Arabs’, which ‘must certainly have an adverse effect on the Negroid Southerners’. Andrews concluded that ‘we are not solely responsible for that past’, but it was inescapable that ‘for 50 years, or two generations, we were in charge and the policy that inspired our stewardship during that period cannot be left out of account’.28

  For the southern Sudanese, the events of 18 August 1955 quickly became a symbol of their struggle for independence. In August 2007, the Sudan Tribune, a southern publication, could state proudly that ‘what happened in Torit on August 18th, 1955 is a great part of Southern Sudanese history that will live with people of South Sudan for centuries to come’.29 The mutiny was an important symbol of southern resistance, but more significantly it marked the beginning of a nightmare for the Sudan, during which civil war raged for nearly forty of the country’s first fifty years of independence. The various wars which plagued the Sudan during that time assumed different guises, but always, underlying the fighting, was a fundamental conflict between the Arabic-speaking north and the African south–despite the reluctance of northern politicians to see matters in such starkly racial, or ethnic, terms.

  It was clear from the outset of the first civil war, which continued sporadically from 1955 until 1972, that the conflict had a racial dimension, and many commentators observed the ‘race war’ element with fascination. Sudan’s first civil war has been characterized as ‘secret, silent and hidden’, a war that was ‘smothered by a grass curtain’. Vague rumours filtered out from the south at times, telling of ‘northern atrocities, of harassed refugees . . . even of deliberate genocide’, but such reports were vehemently denied by the government in Khartoum.30 Yet the war was known about in the West. A report in the Daily Telegraph in March 1967 spoke of ‘Khartoum’s Arab Army’ which had been ‘systematically killing men, women and children of the Southern Sudanese Nilotic tribes and burning their villages and crops for over three years’. The reporter, a ‘special correspondent’, indignantly observed that it was an extraordinary comment on ‘international values that a war of racial extermination (the genocide of Nuremberg) has been going on for years in Central Africa, without anything being done or even v
ery much written about it’. Right-wing apologists for Ian Smith’s illegal regime in Rhodesia were quick to point out the double standard in the seemingly complacent attitude of the West to Sudan and the moral indignation felt by many towards the racist government in Rhodesia. In a letter to The Times on 7 April 1967 headed ‘Where Racialism is Ignored’, Sir David Renton, a Conservative MP, referred to the Sudanese Arab army ‘systematically killing the Nilotic people of the Southern Sudan, most of whom are Christian’. He went on to compare the situation in Sudan with that of Rhodesia: ‘compared with that [Sudanese] brutality the refusal to allow the principle of one man one vote in Rhodesia would be insignificant’. Renton then drew the conclusion that it ‘would be a sad world if coloured people could do what they like to each other while the United Nations declines or is powerless to intervene’.31 In the same month, the BBC’s 24 Hours painted a grim picture of government ‘repression and squalor’ in the southern Sudan, a broadcast which brought a complaint from the Sudanese Ambassador in London, Jamal Mohammed Ahmed. A couple of days later, the Ambassador also made a formal complaint to the Minister of State at the Foreign Office.32

  Some African politicians were quick to exploit the troubles of the Sudan for their own ends. In 1969, Hastings Banda, the leader of Malawi, used the civil war in the Sudan to beat the drum of African nationalism, defining the conflict in purely racial terms: ‘if Malawi was to fight anyone, such enemies would be the Arabs of the Sudan, because they oppress Africans’. In Banda’s crude view, skin colour should determine where people lived: ‘If whites in South Africa, Mozambique or Angola belonged to Europe, then Arabs in Africa should also belong to Asia.’ It was an unsophisticated view, but it captured the mood of racial strife across Africa in the late 1960s.33 The war which was fought in Sudan from 1955 lacked the intensity or ferocity of other orgies of violence which subsequently scarred the continent of Africa, like the Rwanda genocide of 1994, but, by early 1971, the UN estimated that over 500,000 people had been killed in Sudan in the previous sixteen years.34